those seeking insulation walked with their empty petroleum cans to the mouth of the Infulene River, a few miles away, to fetch black mud. One resident of Chamanculo, Armando Guilundo, recalled that during his childhood in the 1940s and early 1950s, his mother did the fetching.77 She would make the trip to the river and back every day for a week, then spread the black mud on the floors of the house and halfway up the inside of the reed walls; when it dried, she would bring the surface to a polish with her palms. “We children would help her carry the mud, but we didn’t know how to make the walls,” he said. Cracks would appear before long, so she repeated the task two to three times a year. For all the time and resources that people invested in building, maintaining, and occasionally decorating their reed homes, all hoped to one day upgrade to something better.
Figures 1.10 and 1.11 Site plan and reed house floor plan in Maxaquene (formerly Malhangalene), drawn by Swedish architecture student Ruth Näslund in 1976. The Malhangalene Survey: A Housing Study of an Unplanned Settlement in Maputo, Mozambique, 1976, vol. 1 (Göteborg, Sweden: Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, Arkitektur, 1977), n.p.
Reed houses were well suited to the subúrbios in at least one respect, though. They could be dismantled and most of their materials recovered for reassembly elsewhere, a feature that took on a particular importance with the growing threat of displacement beginning in the 1950s. A 1959 chronicle in O Brado Africano entitled “Huts in the Air!” described the pitiful sight of the reeds and wood stakes of dismantled houses being carried on the shoulders of men and the heads of women.78 Their landlord has sold the lot they rented to make way for new development, and now they must go in search of another plot. They beg another landowner to allow them to settle on his property, but a few months later he sells the land out from under them. The tenants once again strike their huts, as if they were the tents of nomads, and begin their wanderings anew.
HOUSES OF WOOD AND ZINC
Pereira de Lima dated the beginning of the city’s “Tumultuous Age of Wood and Zinc” to the 1870s.79 Transvaal gold may have given Lourenço Marques a new reason for being, but the burgeoning port town was clad in baser metal. Zinc was what the metal panels were called, but to be more precise, they were iron or steel sheets coated with zinc to inhibit corrosion. With that said, deferring to universal practice I will simply refer to them as zinc panels or chapas, the Portuguese word for “metal sheet.” According to Pereira de Lima, chapas were first introduced to Lourenço Marques in the 1850s, just as Portugal relaxed import controls in the colony. Though the panels were used here and there as roofing, it was not until the 1870s that most Europeans and Asians in the town were living and working in wood-framed buildings with walls and roofs of corrugated zinc. The buildings mimicked the houses and commercial establishments that predominated in Johannesburg.80
Along with quinine and railroads, though less remarked upon, the zinc panel was one of the “tools of empire” that facilitated the penetration of African societies by various European interests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.81 Lightweight and flat, the panels could be transported easily by ship from foundries in Europe to colonial ports around the globe and then carried into hinterlands by rail, by pack animal, and on the crowns of people’s heads. Wood-framed, zinc-paneled structures required no specialized knowledge to build, allowing for the rapid construction of administrative offices, mission stations, and mining camps, and the single-family wood-and-zinc bungalow, a housing type originally developed for British settlers posted in India, was eventually packaged in kits for deployment in Melbourne, Lagos, and Kimberley. Moreover, wood-and-zinc buildings could be easily disassembled as need dictated and conveyed to another site to be rebuilt—an advantage for settler populations uncertain of where the healthiest place to build might prove to be and for prospectors unsure where they might next strike gold. Apart from the more tangible benefits of the wood-and-zinc construction method, the machine-cut wood beams and the factory-made galvanized panels also helped mark a clear distinction between “modern” colonizer and “primitive” colonized at a time when maintaining such a distinction was a matter of great concern and not a little anxiety.82 At one point, the Baldwin ironworks in England enjoyed a near monopoly on the panels distributed in Mozambique and the rest of southern Africa, and it is somehow appropriate that family scion Stanley Baldwin went on to become Britain’s prime minister during the interwar years—the zenith of its African empire.83
From the time that the chapa came into common use in Lourenço Marques in the 1870s until independence a century later, Africans of greater means almost always lived in wood-framed, zinc-paneled houses.84 As we have seen, the changes in the Lourenço Marques building code in the 1910s and 1930s that targeted wood-and-zinc construction in the ringed area were an indirect means of pushing out the African population. In the subúrbios, people continued to build in wood and zinc, just as they had from the city’s beginnings. Zinc panels were an upgrade from reeds in that they blocked the wind and dust and did not need to be replaced every few years. Like reed houses, wood-and-zinc houses were useful in suburban conditions for the same reason they were useful in mining camps: they could be quickly disassembled. Actually, it was only because such houses were considered of “precarious” construction that the municipality allowed them to stand at all, since in the subúrbios, permanent construction was, with very few exceptions, prohibited.85
Figure 1.12 The Guambe house, built in Chamanculo in the 1930s, in 2011. (David Morton)
Figure 1.13 Jochua Guambe (just right of center) and his family, early 1950s. (Castigo Guambe)
Figure 1.14 The Tembe house, built in Chamanculo in the early 1960s, in 2012. (David Morton)
Figure 1.15 Firewood for sale, Minkadjuíne, 1987. (CDFF)
While zinc was relatively durable, it was terrible at regulating the ambient temperature. It magnified outdoor heat, turning rooms into ovens, and it did nothing to insulate against the cold other than fending off the wind. A zinc roof, whether it topped a wood-and-zinc house or a reed house, leaked where nails secured the panels to joists. At night, there was a drizzle indoors even when it was not raining outdoors because moisture would rise from sleeping bodies, condense on the roof panels, and then fall as cold droplets. Zinc-paneled walls did not have to be frequently replaced as reed walls did, but termites fed on wood pillars and rafters, limiting their useful life. For those who could afford it, a common solution was to elevate the house on a concrete plinth, which also elevated it above the frequent water inundations. The low-end wood-and-zinc house was like a simple shed, with a roof inclined in a single direction. The first time the house was expanded in size, a roof incline was added in the direction opposite to the first, just as with the reed house. From the standpoint of status, this second incline was what began to distinguish the house from its neighbors; in fact, such a double incline defined the house. One sought to live in a house of duas águas—“two gradients”—to drain off rainwater in opposite directions.86
Going from a house of two gradients to the embellishments that truly distinguished a wood-and-zinc house was a leap that few could make. The finest houses of wood and zinc, called chalés, featured semienclosed verandas, many gables, and
